Would the legend of zelda be as fun if you could just buy the mastersword for 1000 valor?

Show me where in WoW you could buy the best weapon in the game with tokens. Or any decent weapon. Especially for that pitiful amount you stated.

You'd have to go all the way back to Burning Crusade to find the latter - many of the vendor weapons were good enough for Black Temple, they just took ages to afford. And you've never been able to vendor buy top-tier weaponry.

So yeah, that's a complete strawman. And thus the rest of your post likely is full of similar nonsense so I won't read any further.

I also would like to add: A lot of people seem to forget how difficult normal and heroic Wrath dungeons were. They forget that the dungeons had to be nerfed 4 times before they were fully accessible. There were people like myself that never found that that difficult (Not any more difficult than 55 min Shattered halls or the 45 minute Barron run at least) but there were also others that simply could not do it.

I mentioned this before but MoPs (And cataclysm to an extent) problem is not one of bosses being too easy. Because they are not easier. Using the best raiding guilds in the world which have the experience of 13 raids world top 10 is never a good way to judge the easiness of content. MoPs issue is there is too much to do. So much in fact, that hardcore raiders think they need to do everything and stress themselves, and players that identify as "casual" does a little of everything and gets nothing done and no substantial rewards, and when they finally get gear they feel is good enough to raid in (which is slightly ironic because level 90 dungeon gear is enough) a new tier of content is released.

They did a very very poor job of gating content in this expansion. I hope they learn from their mistakes and do something to restrict the amount of content that can be consumed in one day. Blizzard needs to remember that it is a lot better to have your player base complain that they cannot do content that they want to do because of X lockout, than to have them complain about having to do too much "crappy" content which they don't want to do because it is too much.

It's kind of sad really. Especially because this issue is completely a mental one that can be solved with how content is presented, not with how content is tuned.

The subs from WoTLK to Cata dropped from 12M to under 9.5M simply due to the fact that the content was WAY too hard

Please provide proof to back up that statement, or is it another "99% of internet facts are made up"? In which case, the latest drop in subscriptions are due to the fact that I don't play on their server and they were just too sad with the idea that they'd never play with me, so they quit. Fact!

The intro dungeon. The easy loot piñata. The 10 man raid when 25 man was the norm. The trash filled dungeon with a lack of a coherent story, placed in the middle of nowhere with no real reason to go there other then to get gear. The dungeon that was easier then many of the heroic 5 man dungeons pre-nerf. The puggers paradise. And they very first dungeon with a vehicle boss fight.

And I liked Kara. But if they reintroduced a dungeon exactly like it then people would lose their minds. Its so much like Naxx 10/25, only moreso. Only thing going for it was the visuals and the atmosphere, and the occasional decent boss fight!

I also would like to add: A lot of people seem to forget how difficult normal and heroic Wrath dungeons were. They forget that the dungeons had to be nerfed 4 times before they were fully accessible. There were people like myself that never found that that difficult (Not any more difficult than 55 min Shattered halls or the 45 minute Barron run at least) but there were also others that simply could not do it.

Indeed! People only remember the horrible state 5 mans were in after three tiers had passed. Of course a dungeon designed for people in sub 200ilevel gear is going to be easier for people in 245+ ilevel gear!

I remember Halls of Lightning being a brutal grueling struggle to stay alive, with mobs hitting me (the tank) like an utter truck. With trash packs needing to be CC'ed and pulled correctly otherwise you'd be overwhelmed. With some trash throwing random heavy DoTs at people, and interupts being required. And Loken being for a time the deadliest mob in WoW due to people not understand how to run away from his AoE ability.

I remember Azjol Nerub, and every single party would glitch out the second boss's add waves because it took so long and would often cause wipes before the boss was even engageable, and one idiot could bug out the boss so it would repeatedly heal back to full. And people constantly being locked out of Anub'arak's fight because someone ninja pulled.

Early on Wrath dungeons were hard enough. Not on the par with Cata launch dungeons or TBC pre-nerf dungeons, but a good balance I found.

LFD should be normal dungeons only, Heroics should be harder and pugable only

Normal Droploot: Blue items.
Heroic: Epics.

This.

Increasing difficulty of heroics won't work because of LFD. You just can't expect cooperation from randomly grouped players. That's why hard heroics didn't work at start of Cataclysm.

So it must be not available via LFD. Then people would form groups themselves, forming friendships on server and hopefully reviving realm communities. Players on dead realms could use things like OpenRaid or better just move to other realms.

When I think back to Vanilla and BC I remember having something to do all the time.

What could we do?

This quest took weeks to complete but the reward was an epic item (back then epics actually felt epic)

That was in classic. In BC, the only quests that took weeks were attunements. Attunements are not quest chains so much as additions you do during boss progression, under ideal circumstances. You could complete other quests like the Ogri'la, Shadowmoon, Netherwing, and Demon chains in a day once you actually got them.

You actually felt like you were gearing yourself to fight the hardships in azeroth, not simply waiting for some arbitrary reset(once a week) to allow you to earn more currency.
Currently the game is starting to follow a standard "formula" and with it is losing it's creative edge.(subjective I know but this is how I feel)
- Farm valor to cap each week (because in WOW its not possible to earn anymore Prestige for killing stuff and making the world safer"RPG")
- Farm LFR and normal Dungeons (because in WOW every boss has 3 versions of itself ..... not very immersive )

You are right. The formula used to place more emphasis on rep grinds, and daily dungeon quests which helped with dungeon rewards. Same motivation exists these days, I'm sure.

If anything [Cata] dungeons were not hard enough.

Subjectively, Cataclysm dungeons were the hardest they have ever been.
Objectively, they were too hard for millions of players.

BC heroics offered a CHANCE at earning an epic item from the last boss. For example Sethek halls was extremely hard but it rewarded an epic gem(actually felt epic due to rarity) and the last boss droped an Epic staff with UNIQUE art and great stats.

Don't talk up those gems. Each dungeon had a set of gems that dropped all the damn time from any of the bosses. They weren't that special. Epic drops have existed in every iteration of dungeons apart from Cataclysm, the difference is that dungeons aren't the focus and raids are so there's a disparity in the view of "rarity" that has nothing to do with that.

Now what would you rather do? Dailies that people are complaining about all the time because of the tedious nature or overcoming a difficult obstacle with your friends to earn a reward that is not based on a frivalous currency(Valor) that is droped everywhere, lessening the EPIC feeling of it all.

I would not necessarily prefer daily dungeons which had the possibility of becoming tedious (if you were T5+ geared easily) that dropped frivolous currency in the form of tokens much more than daily dungeons and quests that... still exist.

Cataclysm Dungeons didn't offer rewards on the scale to how difficult the dungeons were. They offered no Epics to obtain from the last boss or as an example, Epic gems. They offered items that were also easily obtained by and overshadowed by Valor. No carrot on a stick for players to chase.

Again with the gems.... They weren't special, even if you still desired them. You could also just straight buy them with your stockpiles of badges at the end of the expansion.

You may say Badge of Justice were the same thing as Valor and I disagree completely

So you built almost your entire argument thus far on that? Do you not remember people complaining about the Zul'aman badge gear or Sunwell badge gear? It devalued raiders' hard work back then, apparently, but everyone was "forced" to grind for them of course. Nothing changes.

Attunements
From my experience people only need to run LFR for 3 hours, knock out the bosses and they are done for the week. Blizzard has actually removed content by making previous content irrelevant and lessening the EPIC feeling items now hold (good bye unique looking armor tiers , Just transmog or run LFR for a recolour...).

Do people not use that OpenRaid addon to do old tiers in Mists? Are people not running LFR on alts in T14 now that T15 is out?

How can an epic reward feel "epic" if the ease of obtaining it is just earning some easy to obtain currency and removing the mystery of finally seeing content that you worked so hard lay eyes upon (just seeing an encounter could be considered just as epic as actually seeing that shiney purple drop).

If you were a player who could only do BC heroic dungeons, and didn't down any bosses with your badge gear... Then there's just as much a chance that there are people who will never down all of the Mists content with their valor gear. Difference is, some of them are given the chance to fail more often now that there are no attunements or keys. Same amount of gear.

When you are part of a fantasy world it make sense unlocking gates or obtaining keys. Rituals/mystery have always been a part of adventure (Looking at you indiana Jones) How great is it for the audience to finally see that door open or waters parts to expose the hidden treasures that await....

Fucking fantastic, if it's a good reveal.

Has it occurred to you that some people just look at MMO-Champion anyway to see the "big reveal" these days and just consider anything up to the reveal on their own characters a grind these days? In the meantime, they pick it apart and say whether or not the content is "shit" or "great", in true internet fashion.

Certain psychological changes in the community have occurred, imo.

In Conclusion/Suggestions

You overlook that Blizzard is currently trying very hard to include interim patch content that mostly utilizes quest chains to tell the story. It is not attunements come again, but certainly better than the majority of Wrath (apart from Bridenbrad) and Thrall chain in Cataclysm from everything that I have seen.

Increasing difficulty of heroics won't work because of LFD. You just can't expect cooperation from randomly grouped players. That's why hard heroics didn't work at start of Cataclysm.

So it must be not available via LFD. Then people would form groups themselves, forming friendships on server and hopefully reviving realm communities. Players on dead realms could use things like OpenRaid or better just move to other realms.

I agree with the sentiment, but the reality is more people would just quit the game as they failed to get the ilvl requirement for LFR because LFD doesn't get them there. Unless you lower LFR even further, I suppose? It's already pretty "low."

I agree with the OP, one of the most epic things in a MMORPG for me is like Sulfuras and Thunderfury, getting a rare drop from a raid then getting rare mats and even grinding some mats if needed to build something really rare and unique. That feeling is incredible when you achieve it. (Especially Sulfuras style, was perfect in my opinion, nowadays it's much less awesome - get random drops then get a reward for it + better storytelling for the legendary that makes more sense and makes it more epic rather than Wrathion being our legendary factory).

When heroics first came out, in TBC people complained they was to hard. So in wrath they made it easier, so people complain it was to easy, so in cata they made them harder, and people complained it was to hard, and couldnt be done in 15 min, so yea... in Mop they made them easier.

The difference is, during TBC, people did not start to leave the game by the millions. Even if some of them thought the heroics were too hard, they stayed because the game overall was fun. Actually, TBC gained over 3 million subs. Wrath gained less than 1 million subs and then became stagnant, Cata and panda have been losing millions.

Vanilla: Fun because the game was new and despite sometimes taking 3+ hours with pugs it was still fun due to the young stage of the game. People would just not tolerate it if a place like Shado-pan monastery took over 2 hours to complete.

BC: Heroics were fun and the harder ones would have hardly ever been completed with the new LFG system, I personally prefered the badge system to valor points and the ability to farm until your heart's content rather than being told when you are no longer allowed to progress.

Wrath: Yea..

Cata: People said they wanted harder heroics after what happened to them if Wrath..Blizzard listened and gave us them...then people complained that they wanted the easier heroics back so they were nerfed.

MoP: we got Wrath style 5 mans from the start.

Possible solution: This wont work with Blizzard's new move in not giving us new 5 mans but I believe there should be a mix of hard 5 mans (like TBC heroics) which are not in the LFG system and require organizing a group on your realm in addition to a bunch of easier ones slapped into LFG for those who don't want a challenge or don't have time.

As with TBC heroics these could offer unique art items or an alternate currency which is uncapped. In addition they could offer a return of chain quests and attunements by requiring each group member to have completed an attunement.

The difference is, during TBC, people did not start to leave the game by the millions. Even if some of them thought the heroics were too hard, they stayed because the game overall was fun. Actually, TBC gained over 3 million subs. Wrath gained less than 1 million subs and then became stagnant, Cata and panda have been losing millions.

I think this is very important to quote, but probably not for the reason you're thinking: By this time, more people had quit WoW than were playing it. The big difference is that the game was still 'new' so they had people continually starting it up. They've already noted that the majority of people that would play WoW already has, thus when people leave, they aren't being replaced by a new generation of player. The game competition for one's time is incredibly high from other games especially in the MMORPG field.

If anything the dungeons were not hard enough. People need difficult content to feel a sense of accomplishment for earning a reward. Would you be proud of an Olympic Gold Medal if you bought one from Walmart? No. Now think of that Medal as an EPIC you buy with Valor(currency).... Is it truly Epic or are they similar to Greens/Greys sold in Vanilla and BC from vendors for gold?

On the other hand you don't run the olympic final every day for several hours. If you did, it would get boring soon.

We got harder heroics in Cataclysm, much harder even than some of the TBC heroics. Heroic Stonecore took nearly an hour and a half for some groups at the start of Cata before the nerfs and don't even get me started on Grim Batol.

Point is, when dungeons were super hard, required coordination far beyond that of a 5man pug, and actually demanded CC in order to succeed, many people stopped playing. The subs from WoTLK to Cata dropped from 12M to under 9.5M simply due to the fact that the content was WAY too hard and this game no longer has a large enough fan base that demands hard content.

The subscription loss in MoP has been vastly smaller than that of the subscription loss in Cata, and MoP GAINED subscriptions back that Cata had lost, whereas Cataclysm gained NO subscriptions from the transition from LK.

Also, a lot of the OP's post is definitely nostalgia. Most of the mechanics (especially dailies and faction grinds) are still in the game today. In fact, a lot of them are much improved, content-wise, and some even took LONGER than some TBC reps did. The 5.0 rep system was a long grind. A month and a half at least to get Pandaren Ambassdor, and that is if you did every daily, every day. People bitched and whined it was too long and too hard, so Blizzard nerfed them heavily and removed a lot of the gates.

Point is, this game succeeds more when it is easier and more accessible to people. But by no means is the game easy. It takes time, dedication, and in a lot more cases than you will admit, skill.

I don't see a lot of these people bitching about how the game has become too easy doing 13/13 Heroic ToT or Full Gold Challenge Modes. That's for damn sure.

And T11 was my absolute favorite besides T8. Those two tiers really shined in WoW.